Consultation or survey?

Finding good eConsultation software is difficult. Often it’s decoupled from debate and the only way people provide feedback is through a survey…which is inevitably a simple form and doesn’t feature any sort of sexy input types.

Worse still, the consultation documents will be PDFs and there’s no way of establishing if somebody has made an informed response.

But what I really want is a good debate tool that isn’t a forum. Here’s a little wish list of features that I’ve compiled recently:-

an easy to use interface

alerts

a conclusion or a decision, which is to be “tested” by the use of the tool

various hypotheses, which are offered in support or in opposition to the conclusion, with degrees of plausibility

logical structure, such as “X follows from Y”

challenges to logical structure, such as “X may not necessarily follow from Y, if you grant Z”

elements of evidence, which make hypotheses more or less probable

recursive relations between these elements

generates its results from an annotated log of a debate

smart ‘analysis’ (sentiment etc).

collaboratively editable texts

social integration

multiple outfut formats: graphs, tables, the raw data

prevents online arguments from retracing the same points over and over.

not have lots of fancy argument types and patterns, because no one really uses that stuff (Debategraph?)

a karma system, because otherwise there’s no way to find the good stuff.